I came across a very interesting study showing email effectiveness, both by open rate and click through rate, by email subject line. Obviously I experiment a lot with email performance, varying subject line, content, design, etc. But it’s great to see data aggregated across a large number of campaigns. The study was done by Adestra and is available here. Based on billions of sent...

Well, it’s time to brag again about the great work we’ve been doing getting press here at OfficeDrop. This past Friday two HUGE publications wrote up the ExpenseMagic/OfficeDrop integration! Both TechCrunch and Fast Company covered how we make it fast and simple to create expense reports right from your mobile phones or PC’s desktop. TechCrunch on OfficeDrop and...

I came across a very interesting study showing email effectiveness, both by open rate and click through rate, by email subject line. Obviously I experiment a lot with email performance, varying subject line, content, design, etc. But it’s great to see data aggregated across a large number of campaigns.

The study was done by Adestra and is available here. Based on billions of sent messages from b2b companies, the looks at performance of different subject lines. I’m just going to quote from solid Marketingchart write up on the study, as it is very interesting data (the following is a direct quote):

Currency symbols: Subject lines containing the £ symbol had a far better-than-average (57.8%) click-to-open rate. Those with $ signs scored above-average in opens (15.7%) and clicks (14.7%), but slightly below-average in click-to-opens (-0.8%). Subject lines containing the € symbol were above-average in opens (2.9%) but below-average in clicks (-8.2%) and click-to-opens (-10.8%). Of course, targeting has a big effect on this – as some symbols may be irrelevant to the recipient.

Discount terms: These generally performed below-average. “Sale” was the outlier, above-average in opens (14.4%), clicks (76.5%), and click-to-opens (54.3%). Others such as “% off,” “discount,” “free,” “half price,” “save,” “voucher,” “early bird,” and “2 for 1″ all came in below-average in all 3 metrics, save for “voucher,” which had above-average opens (6.5%). “Early bird” was the worst performer in terms of clicks (-71.6%) and click-to-opens (-67.6%).

News terms: These had better success than discount terms. “News” (16.2%), “update” (4.9%), “breaking” (33.5%), “alert” (25.9%), and “bulletin” (12.5%) all saw better-than-average click-to-open rates (as well as clicks and opens), with “newsletter” being the only term to perform below-average in each metric. “Alert” saw the best differential for clicks (78.3%), while “news” did best for opens (30.9%).

Content terms: There were more discrepancies in this theme. “Issue” (8.5%) and “top stories” (5.9%) were the only to perform above-average in click-to-opens, although the latter saw slightly below-average open and click rates. “Forecast,” “report,” “whitepaper,” and “download” all saw below-average performance in each of the 3 metrics. “Research,” “interview,” and “video” scored above-average for opens, but below-average for clicks and click-to-opens.

Benefit terms: “Latest” was the only to see above-average clicks (8.8%) and click-to-opens (9%), while “special,” “exclusive,” and “innovate,” while performing about average in opens, fared far more poorly in clicks and click-to-opens.

Event terms: Each of these terms performed below-average in opens, clicks, and click-to-opens. The terms examined were: “exhibition,” “conference,” “webinar,” “seminar,” “training,” “expo,” “event,” “register,” and “registration.” The worst offender for click-to-opens was “webinar” (-63.5%).

Multichannel terms: Facebook (21.6%) and Pinterest (16.4%) were the only terms to score above-average in clicks and click-to-opens, though both showed below-average performance in opens. On the flip side, “app” and “iPad” were above-average in opens, and below-average in clicks and click-to-opens. Both “Twitter” and “LinkedIn” were below-average in all 3 metrics.

Some of the take aways are likely to be correct for many email marketers, regardless of industry. The low performance of words like “webinar” and discount terms is probably something most marketers will see with their email campaigns. But it’s pretty hard to say that currency symbols will perform for everyone.

I guess the usual summary is that it makes sense to aggressively test all of this!

Well, it’s time to brag again about the great work we’ve been doing getting press here at OfficeDrop. This past Friday two HUGE publications wrote up the ExpenseMagic/OfficeDrop integration! Both TechCrunch and Fast Company covered how we make it fast and simple to create expense reports right from your mobile phones or PC’s desktop.

TechCrunch on OfficeDrop and ExpenseMagic

TechCrunch writer Alex Williams covered the integration OfficeDrop/ExpenseMagic combination, writing that “today I had a briefing with OfficeDrop which now has a service that works with ExpenseMagic for scanning and creating expense documents from an iOS, Android device or your desktop. It seems good enough to offer the potential for eliminating much of the manual work I do in preparing expense reports during my precious weekends.”

When Alex interviewed me for the piece, he also asked a lot of questions about the history of OfficeDrop. We discussed how the company was originally a mail in scanning service, and he immediately understood how we used that background as a basis for entering the cloud storage world:

“OfficeDrop has scanning and optics in its DNA. The company started as a service you could use to send your mail for scanning. The model did not work. People wanted to do the scanning themselves. So they pivoted, built a strong search engine to go with the scanning and now offer a combined storage and collaboration service. They see themselves fitting between Box and Dropbox, offering a service for small business people for easily scanning receipts, ideally from a mobile device. Google Drive is also seen as a competitor.”

Christina says, “Through the new partnership, mobile and desktop users will be able to combine OfficeDrop’s smart text recognition technology, which makes the text in your scans searchable, with ExpenseMagic’s data extraction to generate expense reports from any receipts you scan using OfficeDrop. Receipts will go into an ExpenseMagic “uploads” folder, from which ExpenseMagic’s India-based bookkeepers will generate reports that they’ll then drop into a “results” folder overnight.”

We are pretty happy with the way we’ve evolved into a searchable cloud storage system, with the smartphone scanner applications that help small businesses digitize paper, plus the file search engine that helps you find the exact document that you are looking for in an instant. It’s really great to be recognized by a major technology publications like TechCrunch and Fast Company!

I’ll be adding these two pieces of press to the OfficeDrop News and Reviews page soon. Looks like there are a few more on the horizon, which probably talks to the importance of partnerships in today’s cloud/app computing environment.

Ok, well here is my chance to brag a little bit. OfficeDrop recently released our updated Android scanner app, and included 7 inch tablet support. Well, we got some great press with this OfficeDrop Android Update. So I’m going to show off some of it here! As a reminder, I firmly believe that a solid PR strategy is imperatitive to any app marketing efforts. Users will need to remember your app’s name, head to the app store and actually type and then download the app. Even better, if you can get a reporter to link directly to the app in the store then the reader could go directly to the listing and get the app right away. Press does work for app marketing; our Android downloads are way, way up.

As Rip explains it, ” announcing updates to its ScanDrop Mac and ScanDrop Lite apps (ScanDrop Lite is free) that let any Mac user integrate scanned paper with digital screenshots to create multi-age, searchable PDFs. But what’s really cool about this is that, with a single click, users can now share these scanned docs via social networks or store them in Evernote, Dropbox, OfficeDrop, and Google Docs.”

He also gives an example of possible workflow that users can take advantage of using the ScanDrop Mac app: “ within ScanDrop, users can merge scans, screenshots, and image files into a single, multi-page PDF to then share as they choose. If a user scans a receipt, he or she can then grab a screenshot of a corresponding spreadsheet of receipts and share that as a single PDF document through Facebook or Twitter, for example.”

Do we finally have a real competitor to the iPad? Is Amazon going to do it!?!? I’m getting pretty excited here.

Don’t get me wrong, I love my iPad (actually it’s my company’s, but hey). However, the world needs at least one legitimate competitor to the iPad to keep Apple honest and to push the industry to continue to innovate.

More than 250,000 Kindle Fires have been pre-ordered since Amazon announced the new tablet computer last Wednesday, according to a report from Cult of Android.

The blog says a “verified source” within Amazon provided screenshots of the company’s internal inventory system. The screenshots show the Kindle Fire has been pre-ordered at an average rate of 50,000 units per day.

That’s legit if it’s true! Note that I couldn’t link to the original source, Cult of Android, because their blog seems to be down. This is big news… Ah, wait, it’s working for me now:

These leaked shoots show that orders for Amazon’s Android-based tablet are racking up at an average rate of over 2,000 units per hour, or over 50,000 per day… Those numbers make the Kindle Fire’s launch likely to be the biggest tablet launch in history, beating both the iPad and iPad 2 in first month sales. The original iPad sold 300,000 units on April 3, 2010, its first day of availability. In the first month, iPad sales amounted to over a million units. By the time the iPad 2 came around in March of this year, Apple managed to rack up an estimated 2.5 million units in first month of sales.

What does this mean, beyond the fact that there may be another real player in the tablet space? I think that it shows that PRICE really matters in the tablet space. $199 is a sweet spot, perhaps. And remember that HP’s tablet flew off the shelves when the price was really reduced… it looks like there is a market for lower priced tablets. Of course, this follows along with the Google Android strategy of having a LOT of low end phones running on the software.

What will it mean for app developers? 1) Get in the Amazon Android marketplace. 2) Get ready for another form factor + potentially highly modified Android OS. 3) Get your hands on one of these devices ASAP so you can get a feel for how your applications will run on it.